Team Pediatric Transport / ECMO

We are the Pediatric Transport/ECMO team for Children’s Hospital of Georgia (CHOG). Our team performs two very important, specialized services for your children and we would like to tell you about those services. Our hope is that once you hear and understand what it is we do, you would consider donating to the team so that we could continue and improve upon these services.

Many of you might not be aware that your local Children’s hospital offers these very specialized services and what is involved in maintaining them.

What is pediatric transport? Pediatric transport is traveling to other hospitals thru out southeast to pick up children that require specialized care that they can receive at CHOG and not at their local hospital. The Pediatric Transport Team is composed of a specially trained pediatric critical care nurse and respiratory therapist. The team would travel by ground or air to a hospital after being contacted by that hospital and asking for our help. Since the team is so specialized in their training and education, the team can start and perform most of the critical care at the referring hospital. Your child would start receiving the care they need as soon as the team walks in the door.

Currently, our team transports around 250 critically ill children a year and we are growing.

We need your help, as we grow we need specialized equipment like cardiac monitors, IV pumps, stretchers and ongoing training and education.

Our other service we provide is Extracorperal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO). This word sounds scary and this service can be, however, we need this service. Some of you may have heard of the heart-lung bypass machine used when surgeons do heart surgery. ECMO is taking that same concept and bringing it to the bedside for a longer period of time. ECMO is the most extreme case of live support for our children but it is not a last ditch effort. ECMO gives our children another hope of surviving some of the deadly diseases they encounter. This past year we have successfully treated children with severe cases of the flu, asthma, sickle cell disease and other diseases using ECMO.